HTTP: The Definitive Guide

HTTP’s Growing Pains

HTTP originally was conceived as a simple technique for accessing linked multimedia content from distributed information servers. But, over the past decade, HTTP and its derivatives have taken on a much broader role.

HTTP/1.1 now provides tagging and fingerprinting to track document versions, methods to support document uploading and interactions with programmatic gateways, support for multilingual content, security and authentication, caching to reduce traffic, pipelining to reduce latency, persistent connections to reduce startup time and improve bandwidth, and range accesses to implement partial updates. Extensions and derivatives of HTTP have gone even further, supporting document publishing, application serving, arbitrary messaging, video streaming, and foundations for wireless multimedia access. HTTP is becoming a kind of “operating system” for distributed media applications.

The design of HTTP/1.1, while well considered, is beginning to show some strains as HTTP is used more and more as a unified substrate for complex remote operations. There are at least four areas where HTTP shows some growing pains:

Complexity

HTTP is quite complex, and its features are interdependent. It is decidedly painful and error-prone to correctly implement HTTP software, because of the complex, interwoven requirements and the intermixing of connection management, message handling, and functional logic.

Extensibility

HTTP is difficult to extend incrementally. There are many legacy ...